Besim Nebiu – When a Solution Does Not Yet Exist

Besim Nebiu had been working on housing renovation projects for years. Like many in the sector, he was used to operating through proposals, technical standards, and policy language. When considering the renovation of ageing apartment blocks in Skopje, the logic was clear: improve insulation, increase energy efficiency, reduce consumption and costs over time.

These were sound solutions, supported by data and funding.

The moment that changed how he thought about this work occurred during a routine attempt to engage residents. Rather than working through a municipality or intermediary organisation, Besim decided to identify a local leader by speaking directly with tenants. He began ringing doorbells in several similar apartment blocks built in the 1950s.

His initial conversations followed the familiar script: façade renovation, insulation improvements, energy efficiency gains. People were polite but unconvinced. The project did not resonate in the way he had expected.

At one apartment, an elderly woman opened the door. Instead of continuing with the technical explanation, Besim asked whether her apartment was warm enough in winter. She explained that she could afford to heat only one room, as her monthly electricity budget was fixed and limited. The rest of the apartment remained unheated.

That exchange reframed the problem.

The issue was no longer energy efficiency as an abstract objective, but whether someone could live comfortably in their own home. When Besim described the renovation in terms of enabling her to heat two rooms instead of one, without increasing her energy bill, the proposal became immediately understandable. She recognised what was being offered and why it mattered.

She subsequently spoke with her neighbours, helped organise the building, and played a central role in moving the project forward.

What changed in that moment was not the technical solution itself, but the way it was understood. The project had been technically viable before, but it had not yet existed in terms that residents could recognise as relevant to their lives.

For Besim, this experience highlighted a gap he had previously taken for granted: that a well-designed solution would be self-evident. He began to see that if people do not recognise themselves in the way a solution is described, the solution does not yet exist in practice — regardless of its technical merits.

This insight influenced his subsequent work. He became more attentive to how problems were framed, whose language was used, and where legitimacy actually emerged. He also observed that leadership in such processes did not necessarily come from formal authority or expertise, but from those able to translate solutions into terms grounded in lived reality.

Action remained possible after this realisation. But it required a different approach: one that treated understanding not as a given outcome of analysis, but as something that had to be established through language, recognition, and trust. Credibility, he learned, was not something to be assumed — it had to be built in terms that made sense to the people who would live with the consequences.